The world beneath the world knows nothing of the sun. It knows only the deep, patient thrum of the Earth Veins and the faint, cold starlight of the Whispering River. In the golden grotto of the Sunless Dew, a century of silence had just been broken.

  The boy, the Hollow Man, the strange creature from the world above, saw a pact being sealed. He felt the shared essence of the egg and the herb mend the frayed edges of his soul. He saw the serpentine mark brand itself upon the trunk of his Void Tree. He understood it as a soul pact between a man and a beast for mutual survival.

  His understanding was a child’s drawing of a god. It was a simple shape that captured nothing of the terrible, beautiful truth.

  The heavens saw it differently.

  The story had not begun when he offered the herb. It had begun days earlier, in a place of death and rebirth. It had begun in the Glimmering Graveyard.

  When the bone avalanche came, a storm of shattered titans, he had dived for his life. In that frantic, tumbling roll through a rain of razor-sharp, fossilized death, his flesh, for all its new resilience, had not gone unscathed.

  A splinter of bone from a creature dead a thousand millennia had sliced a deep, almost unnoticed gash in the back of his hand—the same hand that clutched his one, precious treasure.

  A single, shimmering droplet of his Primordial Void Blood, a perfect sphere of liquid night alive with captured stars, had welled from the wound. And in the chaos of his desperate flight, it had soaked into the plain cloth he used to shroud the Bone Marrow Spirit Bloom, a single, potent drop of the Origin anointing the pure life essence of the herb.

  He, in his terror, had not even noticed.

  But the serpent had.

  When the boy unwrapped the herb in the grotto, the Sunken Jade Serpent was not just struck by the pure, white light of the bloom's vitality. Its ancient senses, honed by centuries of tasting the very essence of life, were overwhelmed by a scent that should not have existed.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  It smelled the primordial signature of a True Dragon. The scent of a bloodline so ancient, so pure, it was a memory from a time before its own ancestors had even learned to crawl from the mud. It was the scent of its own distant, forgotten god.

  And this impossible scent was wrapped around the one thing that could save its dying child.

  This was the source of its hesitation, the root of its fearful calculation. The creature before it was a baffling paradox: a being as weak as an insect who carried the scent of a celestial emperor.

  And when the herb was placed upon the egg, the true alchemy began. The bloom's pure life essence flowed into the cracks, a divine mortar to seal the dying shell. But it was the single, sanctified drop of Void Blood that was the true catalyst.

  The Origin Blood touched the nascent, fading life within the egg. It did not just heal. It commanded.

  The egg’s own faint, common draconic bloodline, a thing of the deep earth, was met with the fundamental law of all bloodlines. The Origin Blood did not mix with it. It reforged it.

  A silent, spiritual fire ignited within the egg. All impurities, all weaknesses of its lesser lineage were burned away in an instant, purged by a law as absolute as a god’s own judgment. What remained was purified, elevated, transformed.

  And in that same moment, a new, third party entered the pact. The soul of the great, ancient beast whose fossilized marrow had birthed the Bone Marrow Spirit Bloom—its last, lingering wisp of will, a thing of immense, savage pride—was drawn not to the egg, but to the divine blood that now commanded it.

  It found not a rival, but an inheritor. A vessel worthy of its legacy. And in a final, silent act of transference that spanned a thousand ages, it bequeathed its will, its memories of a younger, wilder world, its very spiritual inheritance, not just to the egg, but into the soul of the boy who had unknowingly become the bridge between them.

  The boy thought he had sealed a two-way pact with a beast.

  The heavens knew better.

  He had, in his ignorance, presided over a divine genesis. He had used the blood of a Void Progenitor to awaken the spirit of a Fallen Titan and forge it into the soul of a Dragon Prince.

  The Soul-Pact he felt was not a simple, two-way bond between himself and the serpent. It was a three-way, eternal contract between him, the catalyst; the serpent, the guardian; and the nascent, unhatched dragon in the egg, the inheritor. A holy trinity, bound by a single, sacred drop of his own forgotten blood.

  He was not just a guest in this grotto. He was now, in a way his mortal mind could never comprehend, a part of its most sacred lineage. He was the Origin-Source, the fated being whose blood had made the egg's true destiny possible.

  And he did not even know it.